The Hidden Family (9 page)

It was
big
. Not as big as the palace in Niejwein, or Angbard’s fortress, but bigger than anything she’d ever lived in. And it was clearly mewed up, shutters nailed across those windows that weren’t boarded, gates chained tight. She grinned, gritting her teeth against the cold. “Right, you’re mine.” Then she slipped through the wooden door and onto the sidewalk. The street here was partially swept. On the other side of it lay an open field in the middle of what was dense forest in world one and downtown Cambridge in world two. She could see other big town houses on the other side of the field, but that didn’t matter. She turned left and began walking toward the crossroads she could see at the far corner of the quadrangle.

Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the clock tower on the strange traffic circle at the crossroads. There was almost no traffic on this bitterly cold morning. A lone pony-trap clattered past her, but the only vehicles she saw out and about were strange two-deck streetcars, pantographs sparking occasionally as they whirred down the far side of the field and paused at a stand in the middle of the traffic circle. Miriam blinked back the instinctive urge to check her watch.
What day is it?
she wondered. A sign in heavy classical lettering at the empty tram stop answered her question: Sunday service only.
Oh.
Below it was a timetable as bemusingly exact as anything she’d seen at an airport back home—evidently trams from this stop ran into the waterfront and over something called Deny Bridge once every half hour on Sundays, for a fare of 3d, whatever that meant. She shivered some more and stepped inside the wooden shelter, then fidgeted with the handful of copper change that she had left. Second thoughts began to occur to her. Was it normal for a single woman to catch a tram, unaccompanied, on a Sunday? What if Burgeson’s shop was closed? What if—

A streetcar pulled up beside the shelter with a screech of abused steel wheels. Miriam plucked up her courage and climbed aboard. The driver nodded at her, then without warning moved off. Miriam stumbled, almost losing her footing before she made it into the passenger cabin. She sat down without looking around. The wooden bench was cold but there seemed to be a heater running somewhere. She surreptitiously examined her fellow passengers, using their reflections in the windows when she couldn’t look at them directly without being obvious. They were an odd collection—a fat woman in a ridiculous bonnet who looked like a Salvation Army collector, a couple of thin men in oddly cut, baggy suits with hats pulled down over their ears, a twenty-something mother, bags under her eyes and two quietly bickering children by her side, and a man in what looked like a Civil War uniform coming toward her, a ticket machine hung in front of his chest. Miriam took a deep breath.
I’m going to manage this,
she realized.

“I’m going to Highgate, for Holmes Alley. How much is it, please, and what’s the closest stand? And what’s this stop called?”

“That’ll be fourpence, miss, and I’ll call you when it’s your stop. This is Roundgate interchange.” He looked at her slightly oddly as she handed him a sixpence, but wound off a strip of four penny tickets and some change, then turned away. “
Tickets
, please.”

Ouch.
Miriam examined the tickets in her hand.
Is nothing simple?
she wondered. Even buying streetcar tickets was a minor ordeal of anticipation and surprise.
Brill did very well,
she began to realize.
Maybe too well. Hmm. That would explain why Angbard is letting me run…

The tram trundled downhill at not much better than walking pace, the driver occasionally ringing an electric bell, then stopping next to a raised platform. The houses were much closer together here, in terraces that shared side walls for warmth, built out of cheap red brick stained black from smoke. There was an evil smell of half-burned coal in the air, and chimneys belched from every roofline. She hadn’t noticed it in the nob hill neighborhood of Blackstones, but the whole town smelled of combustion, as if there’d been a house fire a block away. The air was almost acrid, a nasty sour taste undercutting the cold and coating her throat when she tried to breathe. Even the cloud above was yellowish. The tram turned into a main road, rattled around a broad circle with a snow-covered statue of a man on a horse in the middle, then turned along an alarmingly skeletal box-section bridge that jutted out over the river. Miriam, watching the waterfront through the gray-painted girders, felt a most unsettling wave of claustrophobia—as if she was being taken into police custody for a crime she hadn’t committed. She forced herself to shrug it off.
Everything will be alright,
she told herself.

The town center was almost empty compared to its state the last time she’d visited. It smelled strongly of smoke—chimneys on every side bespoke residents in the upstairs flats—but the shop windows were dark, their doors locked. A distant church bell clattered numbly. Scrawny pigeons hopped around near the gutter, exploring a pile of horse dung. The conductor tapped Miriam on the shoulder, and she started. “You’ll be wanting the next stop,” he explained.

“Thank you,” she replied with a wan smile. She stood up, waiting on the open platform as the stop swung into view, then pulled the string threaded through brass eyeholes that she’d seen the other passengers use. A bell dinged behind in the driver’s partition and he threw on the brakes. Miriam hopped off the platform, shook her coat out, hiked her bag up onto her shoulder, and stepped back from the tram as it moved off with a loud whirr and a gurgle of slush. Then she took stock of her surroundings.

Everything looked different in the chilly gloom of a Sunday morning. The shop fronts, comparatively busy last time she’d been here, looked like vacant eyes, and the peddlars hawking roast chestnuts and hand-warmers had disappeared.
Do they have Sunday trading laws here?
she wondered vaguely. That could be a nuisance—

Burgeson’s shop was closed, too, a wooden shutter padlocked into place across the front window. But Miriam spotted something she hadn’t noticed before, a solid wooden door next to the shop with a row of bell-pull handles set in a tarnished plaque beside it. She peered at them.
E. Burgeson, esq.
“Aha,” she muttered, and pulled the handle.

Nothing happened. Miriam waited on the doorstep, her toes freezing and feeling increasingly damp, and cursed her stupidity. She put her hand on the knob and yanked again, and this time heard a distant tinkling reward. Then the door scraped inward on a bare-walled corridor. “Yes?”

“Mr. Burgeson?” she smiled hopefully at him. “I’m back.”

“Oh.” He was dressed as he had been in the shop, except for a pair of outrageous purple slippers worn over bare feet. “You again.” A faint quirk tugged at the side of his upper lip. “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to open the shop.”

“If it’s convenient.”

He sniffed. “It isn’t. And this is rather irregular—although something tells me you don’t put much stock by regularity. Still, if you’d care to grace my humble abode with your presence and wait while I find my galoshes—”

“Certainly.”

She followed him up a tightly spiraling stone-flagged staircase that opened out onto a landing with four stout-looking doors. One of them stood open, and he went inside without waiting for her. Miriam began to follow, then paused on the threshold.

“Come on, come on,” he said irritably. “Don’t leave the door open, you’ll let the cold in. Then I’ll have to fetch more coal from the cellar. What’s keeping you?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, stepping forward and shutting the door behind her. The hall had probably once been wide enough for two people to stand abreast in, and it was at least ten feet high, but now it felt like a canyon. It was walled from floor to ceiling with bookcases, all crammed to bursting. Burgeson had disappeared into a kitchen—at least Miriam supposed it was a kitchen—in which a kettle was boiling atop a cast-iron stove that looked like something that belonged in a museum. The lights flickered as the door closed, and Miriam abruptly realized that they weren’t electric. “I see you’ve got more books up here than you have down in the shop.”

“That’s work, this is pleasure,” he said. “What did you come to disturb my Sunday worship for, this time?”

“Sunday worship? I don’t see much sign of that around here,” Miriam let slip. She backed up hastily. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble?”

“Trouble, no, no trouble, not unless you count having the King Street thief-taker himself asking pointed questions about my visitor of the other morning.” His back was turned to her, so Miriam couldn’t see his expression, but she tightened her grip on her bag, as she suddenly found herself wishing that the pockets of her coat were deep enough to conceal her pistol.

“That wasn’t my doing,” she said evenly.

“I know it wasn’t.” He turned to face her, and she saw that he was holding a somewhat tarnished silver teapot. “And you’d taken the Marx, so it wasn’t as if it was lying around for him to trip over, was it? For which I believe I owe you thanks enough to cancel out any ill will resulting from his unwelcome visit.” He held up the pot. “Can I offer you some refreshment, while you explain why you’re here?”

“Sure.” She glanced in the opposite direction. “In there?”

“The morning room, by all means. I will be but a few moments.”

Miriam walked into Burgeson’s morning room and got a surprise. The room was perfectly round. Even the window frames and the door were curved in line with the wall, and the plaster moldings around the ceiling described a perfect circle twelve feet in diameter. It was also extremely untidy. A huge and dubious Chesterfield sofa with stuffing hanging out of its arms hulked at one side, half submerged beneath a flood of manuscripts and books. An odd-looking upright piano, its scratched lid supporting a small library, leaned drunkenly against the wall. There was a fireplace, but the coals in it barely warmed the air immediately in front of it, and the room was icy cold. A plate with the remnants of a cold lunch sat next to the fireplace. Miriam sat gingerly on the edge of the sofa. The sofa was cold too, so that it seemed to suck the heat right through her layers of heavy clothing.

“How do you take your tea?” Burgeson called. “Milk, sugar?”

He was moving in the hall. She slipped a hand into her bag and pulled out her weapon, and pointed its spine at him. “Milk, no sugar,” she replied.

“Very good.” He advanced, bearing a tray, and laid it down in front of the fireplace. There were, she noticed, bags under his eyes. He looked tired, or possibly ill. “What’s that?” He asked, staring at her hand.

“One good history book deserves another,” she said evenly.

“Oh dear.” He chuckled hoarsely. “You know I can’t offer you anything for it. Not on a Sunday. If the police—”

“Take it, it’s a gift,” she said impatiently.

“A
gift
?” From his expression Miriam deduced that the receipt of presents was not an experience wim which Erasmus Burgeson was well acquainted—he made no move to take it. “I’m touched, m’dear. Mind if I ask what prompted this unexpected generosity?” He was staring at her warily, as if he expected her to sprout bat wings and bite him.

“Sure,” she said easily. “If you would pour the tea before it gets cold? Is it always this cold here in, uh, whatever this city is called?”

He froze for a moment, then knelt down and began pouring tea from the pot into two slightly chipped Delft cups. “Boston.”

“Ah, Boston it is.” She nodded to herself. “The cold?”

“Only when a smog notice is in effect.” Burgeson pointed at the fire. “Damned smokeless fuel ration’s been cut again. You can only burn so much during a smog, or you run out and then it’s just too bad. Especially if the pipes burst. But when old father smog rolls down the Back Bay, you’d rather not have been born, lest pipes of a different kind should go pop.” He coughed for effect and patted his chest. “You speak the King’s English remarkably well for someone who doesn’t know a blessed thing. Where are you from, really?”

She put the book down on the heap on the sofa. “As far as I can tell, about ten miles and two hundred years away,” she said, feeling slightly light-headed at the idea of telling him even this much.

“Not France? Are you sure you don’t work for the dauphin’s department?” He cocked his head on one side, parrotlike.

“Not France. Where I come from they chopped his head off a long time ago.” She watched him carefully.

“Chopped his
head
off? Fascinating—” He rose on one knee, and held out a cup to her.

“Thank you.” She accepted it.

“If this is madness, it’s a most extraordinary delusion,” he said, nodding. “Would you be so good as to tell me more?”

“In due course. I have a couple of questions for you, however.” She took a decorous sip of the tea. “Specifically, taking on trust the question of your belief in my story, you might want to contemplate some of the obstacles a traveler from, um, another world, might face in creating an identity for themselves in this one. And especially in the process of buying a house and starting a business, when one is an unaccompanied female in a strange country. I don’t know much about me legal status of women here other than that it differs quite significantly from where I come from. I think I’m probably going to need a lawyer, and possibly a proxy. Which is why I thought of you.”

“I see.” Burgeson was almost going cross-eyed in his attempts to avoid interrupting her. “Pray tell, why me?”

“Because an officer of the law recommended you.” She grinned. “I figure a fence who is also an informer is probably a safer bet than someone who’s so incompetent that he hasn’t reached a working accommodation with the cops.” There were other reasons too, reasons connected with Miriam’s parents and upbringing, but she wasn’t about to give him that kind of insight into her background. Trust went only so far, after all.

“A fence—” He snorted. “I’m not dishonest or unethical, ma’am.”

“You just sell books that the Lord Provost’s Court wants burned,” she said, with an amused tone. “And the police recommend you. Do I need to draw a diagram?”